


Pink

by CommanderInChief



Category: Holby City
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-24 15:36:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16178060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CommanderInChief/pseuds/CommanderInChief
Summary: Candy floss, hair chalk, raspberry lemonade.Roxanna MacMillan is pink.(4 + 1 Times that pink changed John Gaskell’s life forever.)





	Pink

**Author's Note:**

> Eternal thanks to Ingrid, the best beta on the actual planet.

 

Candy floss, hair chalk, raspberry lemons nade.

Oh yes, Roxanna MacMillian is pink.

It is a thing that explodes from her: pours out from her chest as vibrant as her beliefs, floats nervously about her shoulders, falls in waves at the flaps of her trench-coat. When it reaches her fingertips, it is muted in colour. You can almost see it: a pool of warm energy, guiding her hands in the cool blue lights of an operating theatre.

...

John had never liked pink very much before.

Once upon a time, it had dressed his mother’s bedroom, pale as peach. It had been his bedroom, too, back then, between the boyfriend who was no good and the step-father who smelt of beer.

The skirting boards were cracked, the bedroom carpet stained and the entire flat had an overbearing stench of urine that never quite went away. But, the filth had not mattered to her. Holding the keys like a winning lottery ticket, she had stepped straight into it – and he, just seven, was in taken by the hand, and walked in with her.

He could pull a memory from any of the years that they had lived there. Year two – when she had first brought the stepfather home in a fit of giggles. Year five – when the men who lived next door broke a hole in the wall interconnecting their living rooms – a memory that he is almost certain is a false one, for, when the old man who lived there died, his mother swore that he had lived there alone at least twice as long as they had themselves.

Yet, that first night was the most putrefied into his brain. His mother has made herself beautiful – as she often was. Her cheap yellow hair is piled atop of her head. Her mouth is painted to shine like an overripe berry. They both wear their shoes – just until they could get the council to change the carpets, she’s said – but hers rest on needle points. They twist her carpels to a dislocated angle and leave dot-to-dot trails wherever she walked.

The bottle is a pendulum swinging, an extension of her arm. She swigs straight from the neck but he is handed a glass – dug out of the box marked ‘kitchen’ just for him.

He wipes the dust with the edge of his school jumper sleeve. The liquid tastes funny but his mother gives him a look and drinks it in gulps.

His mother.

_ Mum _ .

Mum is there. Dad is gone.

They could spend their lives like this: drinking wine and watching cartoons and having sleepovers on the living room floor. It didn’t matter is the bedroom walls never got painted or if the dark brown stain was never fixed – because nothing would be bad ever again.

…

It is eleven years before John leaves the chaos of Liverpool with a backpack on his shoulder. When he arrives in Boston, there is only that, a scholarship and the wrapper of an airplane sandwich to his name. 

The campus is beautiful, predictably so. Old buildings. Green grass. Pretty American boys who went out with a hankie stuffed into the left pocket of pristine black jeans.

He smoked around the back of the buildings and dragged his trainers on the grass and let himself underneath lie underneath a handful of the boys on squeaky dorm beds. Life went on.

America. Land of the free – and yet John has never been more  _ bored _ .

He needs a project. He’s already top of his classes, has at least half of the lecturers certain he’ll never amount to anything and the other half eating out of his hand. It’s one of the former kind that trudged through his grant application with fat, wet lips upturned. His idea is too controversial, too cutting edge too…  _ unethical.  _ Empty words they threw at anything that they didn’t happen to like.

Fine.

If he couldn’t research, then he’d just have to look somewhere else. He could take up extra modules, he supposed. He’d even got so far as to sit with admissions and comb through the list. They were all the same: Geriatrics. Anti-natal. Rehab. Harvard university, a melting pot of the greatest minds that he world had to offer- and they were given _General practice in the community._ It made his skin crawl. He learns that their anatomy lectures were held in the same classroom and he feels the inadequacy cling to the wallpaper like stale cigarette smoke.

Perhaps he was going about this the wrong way: his mother had said that God closes doors to open windows. There was something he was predestined to do here, he was sure of it.

He kept his head down, his pen busy and mouth sober. He waited.

September passes in a flurry of new students. Like flocks of exotic birds, they squawk around campus in their electric green glasses, blue legwarmers. By the time that October comes around, they are all equally dull under the clouds of winter. With the first exams looming, their puddle-deep lives are stretched thin. There’s a residual feeling of anxiety that lingers long after they’ve gone. 

What little time he spends out of classes or accommodation, John hides away in the bar under the lecture theatre. It’s devoid of the year below him: very few have had the time to find a fake ID in order to buy a drink. There’s another reason he likes it there, he’s sure of it: something to do with the stripped down staircases, or that anyone is anyone in shocking pink lights.

From the moment he walked in, John  _ knows. _

He has curly dark hair and bitten down fingernails and soft cashmere jumpers that John thinks must be soft to the touch. When he speaks his order-  _ Orange juice, please, freshly squeezed, if you happen to have it-  _ his English accent betrays him.

There are at least three dozen students in that dingy student bar but he is different. He is not colourful. The melancholy around him is thick, grey. He tilts his head: a direct invitation to come and sit. His name is Henrik, born in Sweden but educated in England. At the leisure of a bottomless pit of family money. Pharmaceuticals. Experimental procedures. 

He notices that the glass on John’s thigh is empty. Staring into his lap, he shyly suggests another. Scotch.

He agrees. Whilst Henrik pays for their drinks, John drags his eyes across the man who will expect investment repaid across a cheap mattress. Kisses. Touching. Hands down trousers. He seems the prudish type. Lights off. The swell of a man pressing on his thigh. Just enough to get him off without stopping him from looking his girlfriend in the eye the morning after.

The alcohol slipped down his throat like poison. John’s wondering how many of these boys he’ll chance before he has to think about why he does this. The pink strobe lights are wondering how on earth they ever managed to fit into this boy’s eyes. The glass is wondering how long it will be until he realises that yet again, it is empty.

The answer to the last one is easy: thirty seconds.

Thirty seconds until John stands up because the first two questions rotate around his mind like a council house ceiling when he’s drunk on his mother’s wine. When people describe a person as magnetic: they do not usually mean that they are capable of taking the lead in your stomach and dragging it out through your mouth.

…

Then, there is Rox.

Childlike. Shrouded in pastels with chalk-dust on her fingers. He registers her with a brief interest. Everywhere she walks, it’s like she’s five minutes late, a satchel full with brownie badges swinging at her thigh.

She has an unnerving habit of looking you directly in the eye.

Henrik points her out for the most benign of reasons: she looks lost, she has nowhere to sit, her card got declined trying to pay for an English newspaper and a bag of bright blue sweets. He knows exactly what he’s doing: Henrik has causing guilt down as art.  

Just as they have left her in one place, she will pop up in another. Not just the bar, but cafes and common rooms and quiet corners of the library. Places that a first year has no business in being. He can only do so much firefighting before she shows up behind him in a third year neuroscience lecture. Far from his usual habit of staying behind with him to ask questions, Henrik is out of the room almost the moment that the professor’s finished speaking.

_ I like your bag _ , He hears from across a short space of green.

John wonders if he’d paid any attention to the lecture at all.

From that point on, it’s as though none of it matters. Henrik brings her to their lab, lends her his textbooks and scowls when John rubs her clumsy handwriting from the board. They study locked in syndrome because of  _ her  _ mother, drink a toast to the work that  _ she  _ has made.

Roxanna MacMillan. Protagonist.

John wants to unpeel her. Strip away everything and look at her, bare. She has potential. There is a mind, better than his own, superior perhaps even to Henrik. Like a spoilt child, she fritters it all away on beer and anxiety and pop music.

The newest iteration of bottle blonde doesn’t quite reach up to her roots. Henrik being Henrik, he points this out. Literally- because Rox’s head is in his lap and his fingers are touching her hair. She colours. Her eyes seem to draw in and she stutters out some kind of excuse:  _ she can’t see it properly in the mirror. _

They disappear and then John is alone. Through the walls, he hears their splashes, their laughter. No,  _ giggles _ . The sound catches him by surprise like a stab wound in his chest.  _ I’ve seen him hurt _ , he wants to scream in her face,  _ I dragged him out of that lake. Me.  _ She has no right to him.

She emerges from the bathroom a sunset colour, with planetarium eyes and Henrik can’t look away.

In a moment, John knows that he has lost him for good.

…

They do still meet, occasionally. John’s work stretches across the globe and Henrik always seems to running from one place to another. They overlap, sometimes- it happens once too often to be down to chance alone. If Henrik is staying in Japan and John in Hong Kong, then the four hour plane journey is brushed neatly under the table before they have even sat down for dinner.

Henrik pulls out John’s chair and John pretends to be surprised when he insists on taking care of the bill.

They go back to his flat for coffee. Captive in his living room, John could tell his pearly blue eyes anything.  _ I love you _ .  _ I still hate you. I’m not letting you leave me again.  _ From his own home, in a country where he barely speaks the language, there would be so few places to run. John lets the scenario play out in his head: the rouging of Henrik’s neck, the stuttered apology, the chase through every English bar in that corner of the city.

Perhaps his face gives him away, because Henrik asks if he’s okay.

He asks if he can use the bathroom. They both pretend not to notice that he had dodged the question.

They were good at unspoken contracts, he and Henrik.

It is one of those contracts that absolves John of any guilt as he rifles through the bathroom cabinet. It’s John’s  _ job  _ to look after him. Repayment, almost, for the scotch and the smiles. He will keep him safe, but to do that he needs to  _ understand _ .

He finds it only moments into looking.

A white bottle. The label is perfectly perpendicular to the curve of the bottom but creased its edges, as though it had been peeled off and reapplied until the glue would no longer stick. He quietly cracked the lid. Inside: a pirate’s treasure of gleaming pills, coated in burgundy.  

He replaces the bottle, flushes the toilet.

Henrik is waiting for him in the living room. With the same soft jumpers and Sunday-morning curls, John almost mistakes him for the boy he met in a dirty student bar ten years before.

He sits beside him and takes his hand and spins a story out of the air between them. He uses words like  _ empty  _ and  _ scared  _ and  _ depression _ , invents a calendar’s worth of days and tells Henrik that inside of them, he doesn’t see the point of going on. He forces himself to cry and big, careful arms come up around him.

“ _ Oh, John.” _

He is allowed to stay. Three wonderful weeks in a flat in the middle of nowhere. He will be as ill as Henrik needs to see him be. John recognises that look he has sometimes: worry, woven, layer upon layer, dragging,  _ pulling  _ you down. Except, Henrik wears his as a canvas. Dark, yes, blank at first glance. But you look closer- short smiles and shared drinks and his handwriting- Oh his handwriting- is brilliance framed in self-controlled loops. Those moments are flecks of ease, like twinkles of night-sky silver. Standing bedside Henrik, John could feel wonderful things: insignificance and amazement and dizziness at the stomach. It’s four am on the third night of no sleep that John thinks to himself that it’s like looking at the stars.

The pain will push them together. Henrik will understand him- and to understand him means to love him and John will keep him safe. Always.

Till death do they part.

…

When John finds her in the lab, she is too pathetic to speak. Her eyes are enough.

Sounds come out from her, they may be words.

They are different, depending on whether her head is banging on the wall or her ribs receiving the punches of blunt fists. A crunching anatomy, reduced to splutters.

His own personal musical instrument.

Every blow is a dull, cold pain, almost rhythmically transmitted from wet knuckles to stiff wrist to the very base of his shoulder blade. The rumble in his stomach is proof that his body needs this: the pain and the fatigue and the mindless repetition. His forearm twitches.  _ He  _ needs this. He knocks her head back again, salivating for the familiar sound of a skull cracking open. Better than running. Better than yelling. Cast in alien blue light, John gives up the urge to fight it. This,  _ this _ , is what he was always supposed to be. It’s in his nature, his blood.

A pause before the climax, he teases himself with hesitation. A scientist, he wonders about the limits. His fingers are itching at his side. Just how long could he go?

Self control. Henrik would be proud.

Her eyes blink. Idly, he wonders whether she is still able to see. Perhaps sheer coincidence causes her milky pupils to roll up. She cannot find the centre of his eyes.

He’d hoped that she would beg, but this is somehow sweeter.

He smiles.

“Surely you can’t think I’d let you live, Rox?”

A body falls to the floor.

Perfume bottles. Lipstick smiles. The theatre gloves of an operation gone wrong.  

Roxanna MacMillan is red. 

  
\- Fini  
  



End file.
